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Control Center powers UI’s energy efficiency

Josh O’Leary
6:51 p.m. CDT May 9, 2014

Project assistant Ken Jakubzak works in the UI Energy Control Center located in the UI Services Building in Iowa City, IA on Thursday, May 8, 2014. Built in 2010 at a cost of $500,000, the control center was unveiled at the same year as the UI's ambitious 10-year energy plan called the "2020 Vision." The "vision" calls for the UI to be "net-negative" by the year 2020 meaning it will be using less energy than it was in 2010 despite adding millions of square footage in new construction.
(Photo:
Benjamin Roberts / Iowa City Press-Citizen
)

Surrounded by a bank of computer monitors and facing a wall of flat screens — a small air-traffic control room is an apt analogy — Paterson can virtually drill down into any University of Iowa building from his desk chair.

On one flatscreen is a map of campus, and with the click of a mouse, Paterson hones in on the Chemistry Building. Another click narrows his view to a single air-handler unit in the building. The screen fills with real-time data for the unit, which sits in a 92-year-old building a mile away from Paterson’s station in UI’s Energy Control Center in the University Service Building.

“We can basically see every thermostat in every room, and we can see how much air is delivered to every room on campus,” says Paterson, a utilities systems specialist. “We can use that for troubleshooting and optimization, and we can run automatic algorithms against that data to look for problems.”

UI built its $500,000 Energy Control Center — billed at the time as the “most advanced, comprehensive and integrated” system of its kind in higher education — in 2010, the same year UI rolled out an ambitious 10-year energy plan.

Foremost among the sustainability targets identified in that plan, called the 2020 Vision, was achieving “net-negative” energy growth this decade, meaning UI hopes to be using less energy in 2020 than it did in 2010.

Approaching the halfway point of the decade, the university remains on track to achieve that goal. According to data provided by UI, as of March, the university’s overall energy consumption was just a hair under what it was in December 2010, despite a number of new expansion and construction projects coming online in the years in between.

The challenge of maintaining that net-negative energy usage from this point forward, however, will only steepen as the major facilities construction projects currently underway — including the Pappajohn Biomedical Discovery Building, the new Children’s Hospital, new School of Music and new Hancher Auditorium — open their doors.

By the end of 2016, UI will have an estimated 2.4 million more gross square feet on its main campus and at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics compared with 2010.

In other words, plenty more classrooms, laboratories and music rooms to cool, heat and light. Even so, UI leaders expect to maintain that net-negative trend.

“We’re adding a lot of square footage — and a lot of that square footage is pretty energy intensive,” says Glen Mowery, UI’s director of utilities and energy management.

In December 2010, when UI launched its 2020 Vision initiative, its energy usage was 6.17 trillion BTUs annually. Today, it’s 6.15 trillion BTUs, despite buildings like the College of Public Health, the Football Practice and Operations Facility and West Campus Transportation Center coming online in recent years.

UI estimates that without the energy-saving projects it’s implemented since 2010, its usage today would be 6.9 trillion BTUs annually, or about 12 percent more than where it currently stands.

The gap in actual usage and what the usage would have been without UI’s efficiency efforts has resulted in $5 million annual savings currently, and that gap continues to grow.

“It’s imperative that we address energy consumption first and foremost,” said Liz Christiansen, director of UI’s Office of Sustainability. “The payback is usually so good, that it makes other efforts in sustainability possible.”

For example, even in a newer building like the Campus Wellness and Recreation Center, which opened in 2010, there are opportunities to become more efficient. UI is currently working to upgrade the lighting there, Mowry says.

“When you look at that building, you think, ‘That’s a pretty new building,’ ” Mowry said. “But in reality, we designed that eight or 10 years ago. When the design began, and when we spec’d those systems, that’s already a 10-year-old technology. With lighting and DDC (direct digital controls) technology, that’s a lifetime, 10 years. There’s always opportunities on this campus.”

The second energy-related target in UI’s 2020 Vision initiative is to ramp up the university’s use of alternative energy sources so that by 2020, renewable fuels will account for 40 percent of UI’s overall energy consumption.

To do that, UI has increased its usage of biomass to reduce the amount of coal it burns. For more than a decade, UI has been mixing oat hulls with coal in its power plant, and more recently UI has begun co-firing wood chips. UI also is in the midst of a pilot project experimenting with miscanthus, a high-yield grass that UI hopes can be produced by Iowa farmers and turned into biofuel.

Mowry said UI uses renewable fuels for about 11 percent or 12 percent of its overall energy consumption, but he thinks UI can hit that 40 percent target by 2020.

“I think we’ll see a pretty substantial increase in that number this year, and we’ll ramp up steadily from there,” Mowry said. “The renewable piece is a little bit of a slower start because we can’t jump into things too quickly — we can’t afford to upset the operation. We ease into it by doing our work up front and making sure we won’t have problems with a specific fuel.”

The Energy Control Center has played a key role in UI’s sustainability efforts since its opening. About 90 buildings on UI’s central utilities system are wired into the center, allowing Paterson and his team to monitor the meters for steam, electricity and chilled water use in real time.

The state-of-the art system, which collects information from nearly 100,000 data points on campus, has allowed UI to better optimize its existing facilities and identify new efficiency opportunities, Paterson said. The university also has begun using a new piece of software that collects weather and fuel price information to help UI plan ahead on how best to distribute its resources based on temperature and cost.

Christiansen said the Energy Control Center is vital in UI’s overall sustainability efforts by allowing UI to approach energy reduction in a systematic manner.

“We’re looking not just at how power is produced, or how power is sent out to buildings, or how it’s used, but the entire system,” Chistiansen said. “That’s a principle tenet of sustainability. The second is efficiency, and (the Energy Control Center) embodies efficiencies. We’re looking at information in different ways and are able to do an analysis that makes these efficiencies apparent.”